When Presentail started, it was a single-page website built by a homesick student at NYU who wanted to send his mother a gift for Mother's Day. The student was Adnan Ammache, a finance and global business major who figured a few friends might use the same tool. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Lebanese expats had used it to send gifts home.
Today Presentail is a Beirut-based online gifting platform that delivers across Lebanon, Cyprus, and the UAE. It is run by a team of more than 25 people, working out of one office and two workshops.
A Mother's Day idea built in an NYU dorm
Ammache started the business during his senior year at NYU, where he studied finance and global business. The first version was simple: a website that made it easier and more fun for him to send his mom a gift on Mother's Day. He launched it for friends, and did not expect strangers to find it.
"I created a website, hoping my friends would use it," he writes in the company's founder note. "Little did I know that tens of thousands of other expats would later on want and love our service."
Moving back to Beirut and raising the first round
In 2019, Ammache moved back to Lebanon and joined Flat6Labs Beirut, the regional accelerator. Through the program, he raised $100,000 in funding and brought on his first five hires: Aline, Zein, Carl, Raed, and Nehme. The early team rebuilt the website and signed up more than 30 merchants to supply flowers, chocolates, hampers, and other gift items.
That stretch is what turned Presentail from a side project into a company. The platform stopped being one student's workaround for distance, and started being a service that Lebanese expats anywhere in the world could rely on for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, condolences, and Mother's Day.
What the gifting platform looks like now
Presentail sells flower bouquets, chocolate boxes, stuffed animals, balloons, gourmet treats, and custom hampers, and offers same-day delivery across Lebanon. Customers can add a written message, include branded items, or set preferences for a recipient. The catalog is built around occasions, so the same site that handles a last-minute Mother's Day order can also handle a wedding centerpiece or a corporate gift.
Operationally, the company runs on three promises: fresh stock prepared close to delivery, secure card processing, and on-time arrival across the country. The site is available in English and Arabic, and accepts payments in 13 currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, AED, SAR, and KWD. That setup reflects who the customer actually is, a Lebanese person abroad paying in a foreign currency for someone they love back home.
Lebanon, Cyprus, and the UAE
Presentail now operates in three markets: Lebanon, Cyprus, and the UAE. Beirut remains the company's home, and the Lebanon catalog is the deepest of the three, with same-day delivery to every city and district in the country. The Cyprus and UAE storefronts extend the same idea to two of the largest Lebanese diaspora hubs in the region.
Why the diaspora keeps coming back
Ammache describes the work in plain language. "We are a team of Lebanese expats who created Presentail to help you stay close to the people you love, no matter where you are in the world," reads the company's team note. He still steps into operations from time to time. "It's really important to us that every customer is delighted, which is why every now and then, I join Presentail's operations team to be a part of the magic," he writes.
For a country where so many families have at least one member living somewhere else, that is the actual product. A bouquet of fresh flowers on a birthday in Tripoli, a box of chocolates after a graduation in Saida, a small gift for a grandmother in Beirut on Mother's Day, all ordered from London, Dubai, or New York, and delivered the same day. Presentail's pitch is not the gift. It is closing the distance.
Send a gift with Presentail.
Presentail
